In February of 2000 we opened the second half of our 1999-2000 season at the National Press Club in Washington with Keith Baxter, a multitalented actor and director who had first achieved fame as Prince Hal, playing opposite Sir John Gielgud (King Henry IV) and Orson Welles (Falstaff) in Welles's classic 1966 film Chimes at Midnight. A few weeks earlier, at Middle Temple Hall in London, Mr. Baxter had brought a messsage from Sir John to the 2000 recipient of the Gielgud Award for Excellence in the Dramatic Arts. In March we conversed with one of the most distinguished poets and critics of our era, Anthony Hecht, a former Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress (a post that now carries the title of Poet Laureate). In May we chatted with novelist and scholar George Garrett, a University of Virginia professor and the author of a celebrated trilogy about Sir Walter Raleigh.

In September we extended SPEAKING OF SHAKESPEARE to New York, launching the Guild's 2000-2001 season at the storied Algonquin Hotel with Michael Allinson and Elizabeth Sharland. We returned to that prestigious setting in December with Michael Learned, an actress best known to television viewers as John Boy's mother Olivia in The Waltons, but a dramatic artist equally familiar to Manhattan theatergoers for her roles in such demanding works as Edward Albee's Three Tall Women. Ms. Learned was starring in a Broadway production of Gord Vidal's The Best Man, and she talked not only about that play but about her experiences in dramas by Chekhov, Ibsen, and Shakespeare.